


Across the Moon Like a Prison Bar

by Karmageddon



Category: Veep (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Crueltide, F/M, Yuletide 2016, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-23
Updated: 2016-12-23
Packaged: 2018-09-11 07:08:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8965222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Karmageddon/pseuds/Karmageddon
Summary: What happened between Dan and Amy before Selena.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [indigostohelit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit/gifts).



Amy and Dan never managed to talk before sex, but they talked after sex and between sex. 

Sometimes they would lie in bed at his condo, looking up at the ceiling, Amy’s blonde hair splayed out over the pillow.

(Dan liked seeing it lose its disciplined, Dana Scully undercurl.)

Other times she borrowed one of his t-shirts and they sat on his couch eating take-out. He liked that she didn’t mind him looking at her phone a lot. (Or maybe she didn’t notice because she was looking at her phone.)   

*

He told her about growing up in upstate New York, battling sleet and snow to get to lacrosse practice, for which he had neither love nor talent. She laughed when he told her about getting drunk on houseboats and hitting on a woman he didn’t know was a second cousin. (He didn’t tell her the the cousin thing made no difference to him after he found out.) He told her about having four older siblings, how his brothers would try to scare him when they went on “haunted” hayrides and his sister would intervene. How in high school he and his friends had been drinking in the woods once and thought they’d gotten lost, and in the ensuing panic, they’d shouted, cried (not him, but a couple of the others), threw empty bottles at each another, revealed long-held secrets and resentments (sex with each others’ sisters, critical appraisals of behavior at 4th grade sleepovers) before stumbling into the back parking lot of a Stewart’s just a quarter mile from where they’d started.  

He almost told her (but it was a bridge too far) how his family was too weird for the other families on the street (too many kids, too many books lining the living room shelves) but not weird enough for the families at the Our Lady of La Salette Homeschool Co-op his mother took them to every Thursday, loading them all into a battered minivan with gospel music on the tape deck and lists of Latin verb declensions crumpled on the floor (too few kids, too many books lining the living room shelves).  

*

Once, when he was drunk, he told her how he memorized  _The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere_  as child, how he still remembered it and would say it to himself when he was stressed. She was tipsy from his carefully chosen bottle of wine. She begged him to recite it, letting him get as far as  _masses, and moving shapes of shade_  before she climbed on top of him and kissed him. 

He asked her later, as they ate Thai food naked (he couldn’t believe how beautiful she was, even—maybe especially—with a stray noodle escaping down to her breast and making her laugh) if she knew the poem was a coded appeal for action toward the abolition of slavery. (Of course she did; she knew everything.)

*

His sister, a Dominican nun in Nashville, asked him if he’d met anybody. He said _no_ , thinking it was the truth (she meant, of course, did he have a girlfriend), but before the word was entirely past his lips he saw such a clear image of her in his mind that it felt like a lie. 

*

They ran into a woman Amy knew at a restaurant. (It wasn’t a  _date_  he assured himself, since it wasn’t planned ahead of time—they were both on their way to work and needed to eat anyway.) The woman was tall and bony, with the look of a TV weather girl about her. As she spoke Dan tried not to notice how he felt like a hungry dog under a table, longing for scraps of Amy’s backstory. In between drunkenly flirting with Dan she mockingly related a story from their sorority days ( _Amy was in a sorority_?). Amy, as social secretary, was known for calling early Saturday morning and leaving long, detailed messages about the days events, including weather-related details and advisement on whether a person ought to bring gloves, an umbrella, and so forth, and for this the other girls would ridicule her behind her back as bossy and mothering. 

When they got to the table, Amy has a vacant, stony stare, but she recovered quickly when Dan remarked without looking up from his menu that he would  _never have guessed she was the same age as you; her crows’ feet look deeper than the Marianas Trench_. 

He tried not to notice he was mulling over the anecdote much later (the dog metaphor came to mind again). Amy, up early on a Saturday morning (not surprising) even in college (not surprising) being a thousand percent on top of the little details that made a thing a success or a failure (not surprising). He pushed down the part of him that was an idiot and thought it oddly-touching that college Amy cared enough to tell people to bring gloves on a cold day.  

*

The idiot part of him invited her over on a cold fall night and made her grilled cheese. She sat in the kitchen of his tiny condo (a room they’d barely passed through all the other times she’d been there), perched on a barstool, elbows on the island next a stack of junk mail the maid had neatly stacked. The brilliantly-lit kitchen felt a lot different than the dim light of his bedroom. Tiny veins of silver shimmered in the white counter top.  

The sandwich came out of the skillet and Dan put it on a plate he hadn’t used once in the two years since his mom bought it for him. Out the window a neighbor’s jack-o-lantern flickered on the opposite balcony. He told her that when he was growing up, everyone in his house would pitch in to clean the house on Friday afternoons and then his mom would make them grilled cheese and they would pile into the minivan, pick up their dad up from work, and go to the 7:30 Mass. 

Even though he wasn’t religious (and certainly not Catholic) it was an oddly happy memory: the smell of lemon disinfectant as their small house was transformed from dirty to clean, the crunch of the warm bread and the gooey cheese, driving down the street as the sun dimmed, past the houses on his solid-but-working-class, trucks-in-front block, down the streets with homes so shabby the front doors were open in all kinds of weather. His mother would slide out of the driver’s seat to make room for his dad, whose weary, slumped shoulders always bent over to kiss her as she got into the passenger seat. At the quiet, sparsely attended Friday night Mass the candles would cast flickering gold light on the worn carpet. 

Amy nodded thoughtfully like she understood. She had a couple crumbs sticking to the corner of her lips and looked beautiful. It only occurred to him only as he put her plate in the sink that he was his mother in the way he’d recreated this little scenario. 

He didn’t have to think about it to know to know what he had to do. 

Dan Egan was not his mother, who wasted a Rutgers summa cum laude degree raising five kids. He was not his father who got passed over for promotion after promotion because he wouldn’t be away from his family to put in eighty hour weeks. He was not his brother who got a girl knocked up freshman year of college and was never going to leave their hometown. He was  _Dan fucking Egan_  and he was not going to get distracted. 

*

He didn’t break up with her because they weren’t together. He deleted her number. 

As long as he was in his “Contacts” he booty-called the Georgetown Law professor he used to hook up with on the regular. (Ben Franklin was right about older women; their gratitude was very endearing, and all cats look the same in the dark.)  

*

His sister asked him if he’d met anyone.

He said no. 

**Author's Note:**

> If I recall correctly, all we know of Dan's backstory is that he grew up in upstate New York and his mother is Catholic.


End file.
